Hot Take of Chapter 3 by Yaroslavna Lasytsya

Oh as I reached for it in my city-bright morning, loud and golden was I, when this one opened like a book halfway through the plot, smoky woods already talking in a low, knowing voice and the apricot sun laughing in the trees of my wrists. Time was when musk meant pungency and blunt declarations, but here it walks lightly, dressed in rose dusk and osmanthus hush, the fruits never pouting into sugar, only bright as laughter on a private joke the wearer gets and the world almost hears. It is not young, this scent, and it is not old; amber warms the hours like late light on glass, telling you, under your shirt and practiced sentences, that you are still so very much untamed. It speaks status without swagger, confidence without a shout, a universal tongue of smoke and fruit and polished wood that does not apologise for existing. In Richard Burton's baritone it says: wear me if you dare to be yourself— and it keeps on talking long after the meeting is done, as if the day were its chapter and my skin the only page.